Why do I reverence this saint? Because he knew how to endure alone, and that is what is most important.
Rest well, dear saint, she prayed as she lowered the icon into the cedar chest. She closed the gilded wooden doors that protected the painting, breaking the grip of Simon's staring blue eyes.
She next opened a small box of dark, polished wood, its lid inlaid with bits of mother-of-pearl forming a bird with swirling wings. A dozen small porcelain jars lay in velvet-lined recesses shaped to hold them. Each jar was ornamented with the same floral pattern in a different color, each color that of the powdered pigment the tightly corked jar contained. Take a pinch of the powder, add water and the clear liquid from a raw egg, and you had a jewel-bright paint. Wrapped in linen at one end of the box were her quill pens, brushes, and charcoal sticks.
As always, the sight of her materials made her want to stop what she was doing and paint. She closed the lid gently, stroking its cover, remembering the merchant from Soldaia in the Crimea who had sold her the box outside the Church of Saint John in Stoudion, telling her it came from a land far to the east called Cathay.
The Cathayans must be as civilized as we are to make such a thing, she thought as she put the box in her chest.
This blond Saracen—this Mameluke—whom she had seen briefly and would meet again tomorrow, would not be a civilized man. He was both Turk and Frank—barbarity coupled with barbarity.
"Kriste eleison!" she whispered. "Christ have mercy." Until this moment she had been able to stave off her fear of the danger she was going into. Now it struck her full force, leaving her paralyzed over her traveling chest, her trembling hand still resting on her box of paints as if it were a talisman that could protect her.
She was going among the worst enemies her people had on earth, more to be feared than the Saracens—the Latin Christians of the West. The floor seemed to shake under her, and her body went cold and then hot as she thought of what she must face. If they found out that she was a woman of Constantinople, they would tear the flesh from her bones.
A woman of Constantinople helping a Saracen to plot against the pope!
Fear was like a cold, black ocean, and she was drowning in it. She dared not even let herself imagine the horrors, the torments that would end her life if those people in Orvieto found her out.